Introduction to the Special Issue: New Forms of Intolerance in European Political Life

This introduction summarizes the contributions to the Special Issue that focus on the spread of intolerant and racist discourses in Denmark, Italy, Spain, Greece, and Hungary. Through a comparative approach, the issue argues that what has been decisive in this process is the role played by mainstream political parties that perceive intolerance against the “other” as the natural outcome of the failure of previous tolerant policies on immigrants and minorities. Even if brought forward with different argumentation in each case, intolerance is introduced in all five countries as a principled position under the pretext of protecting European citizens’ rights.     

Interwar fascism and the post-1989 radical right: Ideology,opportunism and historical legacy in Bulgaria and Romania

Do contemporary Bulgarian and Romanian radical right movements represent a legacy of interwar fascism? We argue that the key element is not that interwar movements provided legacies (of structures, ideologies, or organizations) but rather a symbolic “heritage” that contemporary movements can draw upon. The crucial legacy is, rather, the Socialist era, which in asserting its own definitions of interwar fascism created a “useable past” for populist movements. The Peoples’ Republics created a flawed historical consciousness whereby demonized interwar rightist movements could be mobilized after 1989 as historical expressions of “anti-Communist” — and, ergo, positive symbols among those of anti-Communist sentiment. Although radical right parties in both countries may cast themselves as “heirs” to interwar fascism, they share little in common in terms of ideology. Their claims to a fascist legacy is, rather, a factor of how their respective Socialist states characterized the past.     

开启“奥弗顿之窗”:美国桑德斯竞选运动的四个政治遗产

桑德斯竞选运动反映了2008年金融危机爆发后西方世界争取激进变革的新生群众运动对经济不平等现象蔓延的不满情绪,是“占领华尔街”运动爆发之后扭转经济不平等核心诉求重新进入美国政治议程的选举体现。通过重塑政治话语,桑德斯竞选运动成功推动“社会主义”从美国社会中的负面政治标签变成时代思潮,促使左翼政策纲领从边缘主张变成主流议题,激发了年轻人和激进左翼的选举热情,并唤醒了工人的阶级意识,催生美国激进左翼选举联合的可能性,其政治遗产对美国“民主社会主义”的进一步发展发挥了关键的助推作用,并深刻影响了民主党和激进左翼的政策取向和选举策略,将为若干年后“另一个桑德斯”的选举成功开启了“奥弗顿之窗”。桑德斯竞选运动是“占领华尔街”运动爆发之后美国激进左翼政治的重大进展,虽然较难引发美国政治机制的革命性变化,但却可以从推动形成和实施左翼政策纲领的层面促进美国国内政治领域的改良。     

Naturalizing Racism in the Center of Athens in May 2011: Lessons from Greece

In Greece, the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn entered parliament in 2012 after receiving 7% of the national vote; at the same time, anti-migrant rhetoric and racist violence was transformed into an everyday phenomenon, tolerated by the authorities, and mainstreamed in official political and media discourse. Departing from a series of racist attacks in the center of Athens (May 2011), this article examines how far-right ideology became normalized in terms of public discourse. Speaking on behalf of the “average citizen” and against the political establishment, the actors interviewed feel free to castigate immigration and naturalize racism.     

Prayers,pilgrimages and petitions: The secret church and the growth of civil society in Slovakia

The historical feud between Hungary and Romania over Transylvania has escalated in proportion and intensity in recent years. Territorial dispute is no longer central to the present debate. Rather, it is the treatment of approximately two million¹ ethnic Hungarians residing in Transylvania that has generated considerable tension between the governments of Janos Kadar and Nicolae Ceausescu. Transylvania's ethnic Hungarians represent an obstacle to Ceausescu's policy of “national communism,” which promotes “Romanianism” to the detriment of the country's minority populations. In Hungary, reformists both within and outside the Kadar government have pressed the regime for a satisfactory solution to the perceived mistreatment of Hungarians living in neighboring socialist countries. By complicating relations between the two countries, the nationality question also effectively limits the degree to which Hungary and Romania can cooperate succesfully on regional endeavors. Finally, particularly in the case of Romania, exacerbation of the nationality question has attracted increased concern among “external” players, including the Soviet Union and the United States.     

The Mainstreaming of Far-Right Discourse in Denmark

Building on two recent case studies of public debates concerning political meetings arranged by or involving controversial Muslim actors in Denmark, this article argues that an observed mainstreaming of intolerant discourses, most forcefully expressed by the Danish People's Party, can be explained by the proliferation of a new form of “liberal intolerance” that has transformed old racist or nationalist intolerance into a discourse stressing liberal reasons (autonomy, gender equality, social cohesion, public-private divide, security risks) for not tolerating particular Muslim practices. By comparing the two cases, the different toleration/intoleration positions and arguments in the two debates are brought out, and four different modalities of “liberal intolerance” are identified. Further, the article shows how the spread of liberal intolerance discourses across the political spectrum in Denmark has significantly affected Danish (liberal) Muslim actors’ possibilities of political participation and room for maneuvering.     

The Changing Security Agenda in Southeast Asia: Globalization,New Terror,and the Delusions of Regionalism

One of the distinguishing features of international terrorism the past fifteen years has been the resurgence and proliferation of terrorist groups motivated by a religious imperative. Such groups are far more lethal than their secular counterparts, regarding violence as a divine duty or sacramental act conveyed by sacred text and imparted by clerical authority. Moreover, religious terrorism is not restricted to Islamic terrorist groups exclusively in the Middle East. The same characteristics—the legitimization of violence based on religious precepts, the sense of profound alienation and isolation, and the attendant preoccupation with the elimination of a broadly defined category of “enemies”—are also apparent among American Christian white supremacists, among some radical Jewish messianic terrorist movements in Israel, and among radical Sikh movements in India. Finally, as many of these groups embrace strong millennialist or apocalyptic beliefs, we may be on the cusp of a new and potentially more dangerous era of terrorism as the year 2000—the literal millennium—approaches.     

Jihadi-Salafism in Jordan and the Syrian Conflict: Divisions Overcome Unity

Over the last decade, a rift has emerged among Jihadi-salafis in Jordan between the “Zarqawiyyun”—who see Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi as their model and concentrate on combat—and the “Maqdisiyyun”—who want more scholarly guidance, emphasize the establishment of an Islamic State and follow Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi. The conflict in Syria, however, offered options for both: a jihad against a reviled regime and the possibility to set up an Islamic state. It thus had the potential to unite the “Zarqawiyyun” and the “Maqdisiyyun.” This article analyzes why this did not happen.     

The Radical Milieu: Conceptualizing the Supportive Social Environment of Terrorist Groups

Terrorist groups are not completely isolated, socially “free-floating” entities, but emerge from and operate within a specific, immediate social environment—what we call the radical milieu—which shares their perspective and objectives, approves of certain forms of violence, and (at least to a certain extent) supports the violent group morally and logistically. In this article we introduce an approach to conceptualize and analyze this formative and supportive social environment of clandestine groups, addressing the questions of how the radical milieu emerges, what forms it takes, and what role it plays in shaping the development of violent groups. Our focus, thereby, rests on relationship-patterns between violent groups and radical milieus as well as on processes of interaction between radical milieus and their broader political and societal environment, which may entail dynamics of support and control but also isolation and radicalization.     

The ‘African gangs’ narrative: associating Blackness with criminality and other anti-Black racist tropes in Australia

ABSTRACT

This article explores and theorizes anti-Black racist discourses that shape the ways in which the Australian media and other mainstream Australian institutions talk about and view Black Africans. It argues that the long-standing racist trope of synonymizing Blackness with criminality is widespread in Australia. Thus, among other things, this paper theorizes the Australian media narrative of ‘African gangs’ who are supposedly causing havoc in the State of Victoria, Australia. It argues that the January 2018 media reporting about the so-called ‘African gangs’ is a good example that illustrates how the long-standing racist trope of conflating Blackness with criminality is employed in Australia. The discussion is framed within a Black/African Diaspora theoretical framework that allows this study to conceptualize and connect the lived experiences of Black people globally.     

Leninist beneficiaries? Pre-1989 legacies and the radical right in post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe. Some introductory observations

A central topos in the study of Central and Eastern European contemporary politics in general, and of its radical right politics in particular is the emphasis on the extraordinary relevance of history and geography. In fact, the entire transformation process after 1989 is often clothed in terms of historical and geographical categories, either as a “return of history” or a “return to Europe”, or both. In these various scenarios, the radical right claims a prominent place in this politics of return, and the study of this current echoes the more general concern, in the analyses of the region, with historical analogies and the role of legacies. Sometimes analogies are drawn between the post-1989 radical right and interwar fascism, in terms of a “Weimarization” of the transformation countries and the return of the pre-socialist, ultranationalist or even fascist past – the “return of history”. Others argue that since some Central and Eastern European party systems increasingly resemble their Western European counterparts, so does the radical right, at least where it is electorally successful – the “return to Europe”. According to yet another line of thought, the radical right in the region is a phenomenon sui generis, inherently shaped by the historical forces of state socialism and the transformation process and, as a result and in contrast to Western Europe, ideologically more extreme and anti-democratic while organizationally more a movement than a party phenomenon. In all these approaches, the key concepts of “legacies” and the radical right are often underspecified. This volume takes a closer look at the intersection of history or particular legacies, and the mobilization of the radical right in the post-1989 world of the region, while attempting to provide a sharper focus on key concepts. Regardless of the different approaches, all contributions show that with the radical right, a peculiar “syncretic construct” (Tismaneanu) has emerged in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989, which is derived from both pre-communist and communist legacies.     

Reconsidering Women’s Empowerment: the Contradictory Effects of Microfinance for Guatemalan Women

In light of changing global trends that connect women’s empowerment and development, this paper extends debates by exploring how projects aimed at empowering women in the Global South intertwine with diverse women’s lived realities in ways that complicate assessments of “success” or “failure.” The article begins by analyzing the incorporation of the concept of empowerment into mainstream development, demonstrating that the conceptual fuzziness of empowerment has allowed it to be associated with vastly different development strategies: some have interpreted it narrowly to promote self-help strategies whereas others have interpreted it broadly to promote structural change. The former has targeted women with “choice-enhancing” resources that are thought to have spillover effects; the latter tends to adopt a more holistic approach. In order to explore how these contrasting strategies affect women’s empowerment experiences and outcomes on the ground, this article then draws on comparative ethnographies of two microfinance non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that are emblematic of these diverging approaches. It finds that despite their differences, both spillover and holistic approaches lead to diverse and contradictory experiences that defy easy classification as “empowering” or “disempowering.” This finding reveals the advantages and limitations of relying on the concept of empowerment for evaluating development outcomes and raises questions about our ability to generalize about the effects of the varying approaches encompassed under the current feminization of policy. The analysis also suggests that we should adjust our understanding of women’s agency to include the agency women exercise when they transform, challenge, or reject empowerment projects themselves.     

Public–Private Partnership (PPP) as an Interdependent Form (I-Form) Organization

As “public–private partnership” (PPP) is becoming a popular model among states, the debate concerning how to make it more successful is accelerating. Based on insights from contemporary organization theory (OT), the present article suggests that instead of taking PPP as “partnership” between private and public sector partners, it is rather more beneficial to construe it as inter-dependent form (I-Form) organization. Subsequently, it identifies three types of interdependencies, faced by PPP-based I-Form organizations, and furnishes a model—comprising of initial and external conditions, and interplay of internal factors—that could enable smooth functioning and performance of I-Form organization.     

Why Some Cities Provide More Public Goods than Others: A Subnational Comparison of the Provision of Public Goods in German Cities in 1912

What determines a government’s level of public goods provision? Most scholarship tends to focus on the “demand side” of public goods provision, highlighting how varying patterns of social preferences shape the provision of public goods. In an analysis of municipal hospitals and infant health clinics in Germany’s 84 largest cities in 1912, this article uses an original dataset to test a variety of hypotheses to introduce an alternative logic centered around the institutional capability of local governments. The findings suggest a supply-side theory of public goods provision in which the fiscal resources of cities and the professionalism of local government officials are important determinants of the level of public goods. The implications of these findings are two-fold: first, in federal political systems, highly capable local governments—with resources, expertise and professionalism—might represent a “decentralized” or “bottom-up” path for achieving higher overall levels of state infrastructural power in a political system. Second, public health threats might serve as a crucial trigger for the development of local capacity and hence state infrastructural power more broadly.     

Grassroots Citizenship at Multiple Scales: Rethinking Immigrant Civic Participation

Given the finding that the marginalized are less politically engaged, we examine those who are arguably the most marginalized—the undocumented—and ask: what underwrites recent cases where the undocumented have been politically engaged in meaningful and substantive ways? Additionally, how does this compare with the existing literature on the practice of citizenship for those with formal rights? And what are the implications for our understanding of political participation in the contemporary USA? We seek to address these questions by examining cases where undocumented immigrants act like citizens even though they lack formal political rights. Our cases deviate from previous literature which argues that more marginalized people participate less and that those without formal rights engage in contentious politics in lieu of “normal,” institutional politics. Our analysis of the DREAMers and of immigrant worker centers helps us rethink this traditional distinction between “normal” and contentious politics. Moving beyond a focus on the specific actions that fall into each category, we instead emphasize how the context for these actions is crucial to understanding the foundations of political participation. In particular, we argue that the same “normal” political actions taken by citizens versus noncitizens reveals different foundations underneath; for those without formal rights, what underwrites participation in “normal” and contentious politics alike is what we call grassroots citizenship. We examine how the political participation of undocumented workers and DREAMers takes place within immigrant organizations and how it relies on three pillars: solidarity, critical analysis, and collective action. While previous literature has emphasized the urban and local nature of active, alternative citizenships, our cases operate at multiple scales, demonstrating how grassroot citizenship can be leveraged and “scaled up” to state and national levels. Additionally, through an analysis of grassroots citizenship, we get some purchase on the question of why politicians sometimes listen to people who cannot vote.     

Exploring the “Root Causes” of Terrorism

This article attempts to clarify what is meant by “root causes” and considers if their analysis helps to explain and describe how, where, and why terrorism occurs. In attempting to explore—but not definitively resolve—these challenges, the article will attempt to delineate “root causes” into qualitative and quantitative variables that can be empirically tested in relation to contemporary terrorist activity. In so doing, it considers the relative merits of different methodologies for approaching “root causes.” The article concludes that indirect and underlying sources of conflict are significant to understanding specific incidents of terrorism and certain categories of terrorism; that “root causes” are less helpful in describing and explaining terrorism as a general phenomenon; and that root causes are of analytical use only in conjunction with precipitant factors.     

Decisionism and action: changing perspectives in organization theory

The neglect of moral discourse in mainstream organization theory during the past four decades may be attributed to the dominance of the “decision,” popularized by Herbert Simon, as the field's primary unit of analysis. Underwritten by an epistemology derived from the logical positivists’ analytical distinction between value and fact, the idea of decision has come to be uncritically accepted as a morally neutral and empirically self-evident beginning point for organizational analysis. The ethnomethodological writings of Harold Garfinkel, coupled with insights from contemporary philosophy of language, radically challenge the value-fact distinction, pointing to an epistemology of everyday life in which value and fact are initially fused. The inherent fusion of value and fact provides the basis for an alternative epistemology for organization theory—termed the “action” or “process” perspective—which fundamentally alters the empirical understanding of organizational life and, consistent with the writings of Mary Parker Follett, enables the recovery of organization theory's moral center.

Commenting on the effects of technology on modern consciousness, Manfred Stanley has noted that:

Of all the upheavals of history and culture, it is difficult to imagine any of greater scope than the decline and fall not of some one vision of the good, but of the good itself. The rise of the notion that there is no such phenomenon as the good in the objective nature of things must be the most ironic anticlimax possible to centuries of bitter conflict between those who felt themselves empowered to define it.⁽¹⁾

For Stanley, the problem is not technology as such, but “technicism”: the implicit, even unconscious, belief that the humanly possible is synonymous with the technologically available. In technicist consciousness, technology is no longer a means for attaining the good, because “means” presupposes a prior moral or practical end in whose service that means is applied. Should any conception of the good be embraced at all, he argues, it ironically can merely be an artifact of what has been made available by technology.

Technicism has become the predominant attribute of modern consciousness, producing what William Barrett, speaking in a slightly different context, calls “the illusion of technique.”⁽²⁾

In the collective infatuation with technology, Barrett argues,

... we have come to regard it [technology] as the source for the discovery of human meaning. The tragic consequence of this is the inevitable alienation of man from himself and his estrangement from others. The irony of technicism to which Stanley alluded earlier may be summarized as a reversal of a familiar aphorism—invention has now become the mother of necessity—albeit one devoid of moral content.

Stanley sees the rise of technicism as concomitant with the emergence of liberal society, whose institutions have achieved coherence and legitimacy explainable in terms of three themes that have dominated Western thought since the seventeenth century. The first is the general desanctification or secularization of the political economy exemplified ... in the transformation of human skills and the earth itself into objective commodity resources for commercial production.⁽³⁾ The second theme is the ascendancy of the market principle as the chief basis of socioeconomic organization, wherein interests are privately held by individuals rather than shared by communities or other larger collectivities. Finally, there is the theme of pluralistic representation in political decision making, where the expression of individual (and group) interest is tolerated in the hope of achieving a balance among them.

Taken together these themes have produced a pervasive sense of nihilism in Western society insofar as they seem to exclude the possibility “of grounding collective standards of value priorities in anything more transcendent than the simplest shared utilities like power, wealth, and the security of one's immediate personal circumstances.”⁽⁴⁾

The consequence of the three themes of liberal society, profoundly abetted by technicist consciousness, is nothing less than the loss “of a sense of common human community in the West”⁽⁵⁾and also of the moral possibility of a common, transcendent good.     

The EU’s Democratic Deficit and Repeated Referendums in Ireland

This analysis tackles the question of whether the democratic deficit in the European Union is associated with repeated referendums—giving voters a second chance to vote “yes” for EU treaties. Looking at repeated referendums in Ireland on the Nice and Lisbon treaties, I argue that, broadly speaking, these referendums failed to give Irish voters the meaningful ability to contest the direction of EU policy or to choose among alternative policy options, an example of how the democratic deficit can endure even when the EU incorporates electoral mechanisms. I first discuss how this theoretical insight is evidenced by five aspects of the Irish referendums. Then, I examine three of these aspects more closely in case studies of the Nice and Lisbon referendums, focusing on how leaders (1) conceptualized the failure of the initial referendums as deriving from voter incomprehension, (2) planned repeated referendums in an additional effort to ratify the treaties, and (3) mobilized “yes” voters through extreme predictions about the consequences of second “no” outcomes. I conclude by discussing socio-economic trends seen from 2003 to 2014 and their implications for issues related to the EU’s democratic deficit.     

Dynamics of Islam,identity, and institutional rule in Uzbekistan: Constructing a paradigm for conflict resolution

The “re-Islamization” of society in independent Uzbekistan has proven to be a complex process, generating conflict in the social, cultural and political spheres. Since the early 1990s, the regime of Islam Karimov has sought to undermine any manifestation of “unofficial” Islam via imprisonment of the leadership, implementation of repressive statutes governing religious activity, and other coercive means. Yet, since 1999 Uzbekistan has experienced more religious violence directed against government power structures by “extremists” than any other former Soviet republic in Central Asia. Important issues that should direct U.S. policy remain unresolved: How significant is the threat from radical Islam in Uzbekistan, that is, what are the chances of politicized, “fundamentalist” Islam emerging as a mass movement there? Has recent U.S. policy reduced or exacerbated the dynamics of conflict between the regime and the “radicals?” In order to effect resolution of this conflict, a new paradigm must be implemented in U.S.–Uzbek relations which moves the Uzbek regime toward democratization, while maintaining social stability. In addition, politicized Islam, in a non-radicalized form, should also figure into any policy strategy directed at long-term stability in Uzbekistan.